An Ode to Lowlands

A Temporary Utopia

 

 

 

 

 

Introduction

Thirteen years had passed since I last set foot on the Lowlands festival grounds. Life had taken a different turn, I gave birth to two children, the years slipped away and the festival faded into the background. Until this year. My return felt like a leap through time, as if embracing an old lover once more. The grounds had changed, the stages were larger, the organization tighter—yet the same elusive magic still hung in the air.

 

Lowlands is more than a festival. It is a temporary society, a place where for four days another reality becomes palpable. People share what they have, look out for each other, are joyful, open, helpful and generous. It feels as if a collective promise drifts through the air: the world could be like this. Here, for a moment, we are more than individuals in a hurried society; here, we are community.

 

 

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The temporary utopia

What distinguishes Lowlands from daily life is not only the music, the art or the flood of stimuli. It is the way people relate to one another. As if, once inside the festival gates, another logic applies—a logic of openness, care, and generosity. You lend someone a lighter, help a stranger to their feet, share a joint or a beer with someone who quickly ceases to be a stranger.

 

Beneath these small gestures lies a deeper, carrying fabric: Love. Not as a romantic feeling, but as a binding principle that sustains the atmosphere. Love allows people to truly see one another—without judgment, without hierarchy. It is this quiet force that makes Lowlands more than a festival: it transforms the grounds into a temporary society where the other is not a threat, but a promise.

 

This effortless care for each other creates a community that feels almost unreal. The sharp edges of everyday life—competition, distrust, haste—dissolve into a shared current of music, dance, and closeness. Lowlands becomes a miniature society founded on equality and connection. Not because it is imposed, but because everyone feels it and embodies it.

 

For a brief moment, a utopia emerges—not in words, but in actions. A society where the other is not a rival or a threat, but a fellow human being.

 

  

 

The shadow side: Capitalism at Lowlands

Yet even this temporary utopia comes at a price. Literally. Lowlands has long ceased to be an underground festival; it has become a brand, a product that fits seamlessly into the capitalist system. This year, it sold out 65,000 tickets in just 23 minutes.

 

The brand of Lowlands holds enormous appeal, but also a downside: entry is expensive, the prices for food and drinks are absurd and even a simple T-shirt costs a fortune.

 

The festival presents itself as an open society where everyone is welcome, but in reality not everyone can afford the experience. Only those who are relatively well off can purchase a ticket, a campsite and four days’ worth of consumption.

 

Thus arises a bitter paradox: a place that embodies freedom, connection and equality is, in practice, only accessible to a select group.

 

Capitalism penetrates even our utopias. It turns connection into a product and attaches a price tag to the experience of community. It even threatens to reduce love—the quiet force of care and generosity—to a commodity. What once seemed natural—looking after one another, sharing, generosity, equality—becomes absorbed into a system that places profit above people.

 

 

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Philosophical reflection

What takes shape at Lowlands can also be understood philosophically. Anthropologist Victor Turner described festivals and rituals as liminal spaces: transitional zones where the ordinary order is temporarily suspended. Within this liminality arises what he called communitas—an intense experience of equality and connection, in which boundaries between people dissolve.

 

At Lowlands this becomes visible and tangible. In the dancing crowd there is no hierarchy; you are together, absorbed into something larger. That moment of I and Thou, as Martin Buber described it, in which the other is not a means but a living presence who touches you. Erich Fromm, too, would have recognized his thought here: love not as a romantic feeling, but as active commitment, the willingness to truly see the other.

 

What Turner called communitas, what Buber saw in the I-Thou encounter and what Fromm defined as active commitment, can ultimately be named as one and the same: Love as the carrying principle of human connection. At Lowlands, this love is temporarily tangible, showing us what could always be possible.

 

And yet there is friction. For what Turner, Buber, and Fromm regarded as essential human experience, at Lowlands is surrounded by commerce and capitalist structures. The moment of connection is real, but it occurs within a system that sustains its opposite: inequality, exclusion, exploitation. Lowlands thus becomes a mirror of our time: a reminder of what is possible, but also a painful confrontation with what is obstructed by capitalism.

 

 

 

Conclusion

Lowlands shows that it is possible: living together with care, equality and involvement. It proves that people can form a miniature society in which generosity and connection are self-evident. But this very experience also exposes the wound: within a capitalist system, a true utopia can never take root.

 

Capitalism is not about fairness or equality; it is about the maximization of profit, often at the expense of people. It turns even connection into a product for sale to those who can afford it, while those at the bottom are left out. In doing so, it hollows out our society and undermines precisely the values that Lowlands makes so palpable.

 

And yet something remains: the memory. For even if Lowlands is temporary and fragile, the experience itself cannot be erased. For those who were there, it endures as proof that another way of living together is possible. A promise that, even in a world steered by capitalism, Love cannot be eradicated. It is rooted in our very being.

 

Perhaps that is the true strength of Lowlands: not the illusion of a perfect utopia, but the touch of memory—of Love as the carrying fabric of all human community.

 

One thing I know for sure: for me, Lowlands has been reinstated as an annual tradition. See you next year, Lowlands!